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‘The same goes for gnostic Christianity, where we had the strict ascetics on the one hand and the extreme libertines on the other.’

‘He championed victims of injustice and the public came to view him not as an impudent libertine but as a patriarch and a sage.’

‘Gabriel comes across as a libertine and something of anarchist.’

‘In the 1630s as well as the 1670s, Boston was inhabited by libertines as well as orthodox Puritans, but in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, town leaders feared that they were losing control.’

‘Certainly she is a very rigorous, not to say humourless, libertine.’

‘Some libertines started claiming to have pacts with Satan, while still others said the devil himself presided over the soirées.’

adjective

‘My friend graduated from photography school in New York, and, like many artists, plunged into a libertine lifestyle with more than a little enthusiasm.’

‘The fear is that conservative groups could use a clause in the Bill which limits the kind of sexual information that can be given to minors to wage war on the magazines' libertine approach to under-age sex.’

‘The prince had become foolhardy and libertine.’

‘In the libertine Utopia of ‘sexual freedom,’ women and children will suffer the most.’

‘We'll all pretend to be duly chastised by our libertine ways and pay obeisance to those good heartland values that neither they nor we actually live by.’

‘She's pretty, clean, and libertine - everything you could ever want in a French woman.’

‘Tourism is associated in the minds of many ordinary Egyptians with a libertine lifestyle offensive to the puritanism of Muslim piety.’

‘Indeed, the health consequences of the libertine life-style are, when compared with the consequences of smoking, truly disastrous.’

‘For so long, many religious conservatives have fought for laws to be passed in the face of a culture that was very libertine and pro-choice.’

‘I simply take this logic to its conclusion and point out that this woman's wanton and libertine approach to grace is the camel's nose under the tent.’

Origin

Late Middle English (denoting a freed slave or the son of one): from Latin libertinus freedman, from liber free. In the mid 16th century, imitating French libertin, the term denoted a member of any of various antinomian sects in France; hence libertine.